Howard Fuller worries that 'the war' over vouchers has
divided people who should be working together to improve the
schools.

As the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka turns 50 this week, don’t expect Annette P.
Williams to be wishing it a happy anniversary. After all, it was her
disillusionment with school desegregation that stirred her to lead the
charge 14 years ago for this city’s pioneering program of private
school vouchers.

Not that Williams, who has represented a slice of inner-city
Milwaukee in the Wisconsin legislature for 24 of her 67 years, was a
great fan of the legally sanctioned segregation that was struck down by
Brown. But the one-time welfare mother saw the approach local
leaders took to bringing the races together—mainly busing black
children to faraway neighborhoods—as an unmitigated disaster for
the black community she still represents.

"Desegregation is about the movement of bodies; it had nothing to do
with education," asserts Williams, who goes by her middle name, Polly.
"Our focus in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is all about
education. It’s not about integration or desegregation. We
don’t even think about that."

Given the demographic reality of Milwaukee today, such views are
understandable. With white students down to a small minority—not
just in public schools, but in many private ones as well—one-race
schools are far easier to find than examples of multicultural mixing in
Wisconsin’s largest city. Yet the ghosts of desegregation battles
past still linger in the movement Williams helped kick-start here on
Lake Michigan’s western shore. References to
Brown—and the epic struggle by African-Americans for
educational justice that it symbolizes—have become common not
only here, but virtually anywhere that the contentious issue of private
school choice is on the agenda. Leaders on both sides of the voucher
divide are invoking the landmark case to promote their visions, not
just in legal skirmishes and policy blueprints, but also in the battle
for hearts and minds.

"Both sides use the same language of equality and opportunity," says
John C. Brittain, a law professor at Texas Southern University in
Houston who represented the plaintiffs in a long-running desegregation
case in Hartford, Conn.

Behind the words are challenges to rethink old questions about the
most promising strategies for achieving the long-cherished goal of
equal educational opportunity in America. At stake for both camps is
the right to carry the torch of Brown—to lay claim to the
dream of a nation where skin color plays no role in a child’s
shot at success.

Preaching to a choir of school choice activists here a couple of
months ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige noted that a
half-century after the Brown ruling, the problems faced by black
children "are still there to see: lack of educational achievement, the
denial of educational opportunities, and the economic consequences that
follow." The Mississippi native then reached back further—back to
the 19th-century fight to end slavery.

"In my view, opportunity scholarships provide a workable, hopeful
alternative to open private schools to low-income and minority
students," he said of vouchers in his March 5 speech at the annual
meeting of the Washington-based Black Alliance for Educational Options.
"For each of these students, this is educational emancipation."

Another son of the segregated South, Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, sounded a similar theme in his concurring opinion in the high
court’s 5-4 decision upholding the Cleveland voucher program in
2002. "Today many of our inner-city public schools deny emancipation to
urban minority students," he wrote. "Despite this court’s
observation nearly 50 years ago in Brown v. Board of
Education that it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be
expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an
education, urban children have been forced into a system that
continually fails them."

And during last year’s bitter debate in Congress over the
soon-to-start voucher program for the District of Columbia, parent
activists mounted an ad campaign that went so far as to liken voucher
foes to Southern segregationists. In a TV spot targeting Sen. Edward M.
Kennedy, D-Mass., for example, the leader of the parents’ group
recalled being reassured by her mother that the late Sen. Robert F.
Kennedy was fighting against those who sought to "stop our race from
getting a good education." Photographs of such champions of segregation
as Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace flashed on the screen.

"Senator Kennedy, your brothers fought for us," Virginia
Walden-Ford, an African-American mother who heads the group D.C.
Parents for School Choice, said in the spot. "Why do you fight against
us?"

National opponents of vouchers were outraged by the ads. In
Milwaukee, local leaders of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People also take issue with the portrayal of
vouchers as a modern-day civil rights cause.

"We don’t feel that going the way of vouchers complements
Brown v. Board of Education, because it lends itself
toward segregation more than anything else," says Jerry Ann Hamilton,
the president of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP. "The education
system has to be revamped, but we think that going the way of vouchers
is leading away from what we had in mind."

Paulette Y. Copeland, a member of the board of the local NAACP
chapter and the vice president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education
Association, also is rankled by suggestions that vouchers are a means
of addressing the unfulfilled promises of Brown. Copeland, a
literacy specialist for the Milwaukee school district, rejects the
argument that vouchers help emancipate poor families by giving them the
same type of choices that wealthier families have long enjoyed. "Choice
schools are not the same quality as those schools open to the
middle-class and rich families," she contends.

Still, to address social-justice concerns, Copeland suggests that
foundations and wealthy individuals that back voucher-advocacy efforts
instead give tuition aid directly to low-income families. "Let the
public schools deal with the public money," she says.

Milwaukee’s voucher program has mushroomed from serving 341
students at seven secular private schools in 1990 to supporting 13,231
students in 112 schools, 79 of them religious. The $76 million program
has always been limited to children from families within the city
limits whose incomes do not exceed 175 percent of the federal poverty
level, or about $32,500 for a family of four. In practical terms, that
means that the program is open mainly to children of color, a majority
of them black.

In Milwaukee, dissatisfaction with the results of
busing helped fuel the support for vouchers among black parents and
policymakers.

Among the schools spawned by the choice program is the Milwaukee
Multicultural Academy, located in a mainly black neighborhood on the
city’s north side. Housed in a former synagogue, the school
proudly posts its mission at the door: "Developing the Multicultural
Mind for the New Millennium."

But inside the worn-looking, one-story structure, the scene is far
less multicultural than Principal Jerry D. Fair would like. When he
started the school with 27 students six years ago, Fair was hoping to
replicate the racial and ethnic diversity of two public schools in the
city that he once headed. "I had this multicultural vision," he says
between interruptions in his cramped office.

As it’s turned out, all but three of his 131 students are
black. Many students arrive years behind academically. Seven of the 12
new 5th graders he accepted this year tested at a prekindergarten
reading level, he says. As the president of an association of black-run
independent schools in Milwaukee, Fair is committed to strengthening
schools run by and for African- Americans. Yet he hopes to move his
school someday to a less homogeneous neighborhood, so his multicultural
vision could be realized. "Diversity is just really an important thing
for me," he says.

From the start of the choice program, opponents have complained that
it would worsen school segregation in a city long divided by race. The
NAACP made such a prediction, for example, in a lawsuit that
unsuccessfully challenged the 1995 state law that expanded the program
to religious schools.

A 2002 study by Howard L. Fuller, a former Milwaukee superintendent
who is now a leading national advocate of school choice, found that
compared with students in the city’s public schools, a slightly
lower percentage of youngsters in voucher schools in 2001-02 were in
"racially isolated" settings. The difference was small, though, with
49.8 percent of students in the participating private schools in such
settings—defined as having at least 90 percent either minority or
white enrollment—compared with 54.4 percent in public schools. In
general, the study said, students in participating religious schools
were less likely to be racially isolated than in the secular schools,
many of which are all-black or nearly so.

"[T]he data suggest that including religious schools in a voucher
program targeting low-income families has contributed to more
integration in private religious schools than in the Milwaukee public
school system," says the analysis co-written by Fuller, who is now a
professor at Marquette University here.

Critics of the choice program are skeptical of such conclusions.
Jennifer Morales, an outspoken voucher opponent on the Milwaukee school
board, dismisses the numbers as "ridiculous." "The private schools are
not integrated," she says. "I don’t think they’re any more
integrated than we are."

Whether or not that’s true, says Fuller, discussions of racial
balancing in the schools have been made moot in his hometown by the
steady decline in the white population. In the 105,000-student
Milwaukee public schools, just 15 percent of students were white as of
2002-03, down from 26 percent a decade earlier. Sixty percent were
black; 17 percent were Hispanic, up from 10 percent a decade earlier.
Statistics on the demographic breakdown of participants in the voucher
program are not available.

"While integration is still the ultimate goal, the reality for most
black students in inner-city America is that they’re not going to
be in integrated schools," Fuller says. "So the question is, how are
they going to be educated?"

The Rev. E. Allen Sorum, a white Lutheran minister whose church runs
a school in a north-side neighborhood that has become nearly all black,
offers one answer to that question. The school’s enrollment has
shifted to the point that the only white students for the past 15 years
have been children of school staff members. But despite the lack of
integration, Sorum sees his school as dispensing tools youngsters can
use to break down racial barriers later in life.

"The world is racist," he tells the 110-student school’s
combined 7th and 8th grade class during a recent discussion of the
voucher program. "But God’s given you great gifts so you can make
God look good in the world. If you’re a highly educated,
God-loving, righteous-preaching Christian, you’re going to dispel
whatever prejudices other races have when you go out into society."

Without the $5,882 tuition vouchers that the state-run program
provides, Sorum figures that Garden Homes Lutheran School would have
shut down two years ago. Instead, the school is on a growth spurt that
will quicken next year, when it moves across the street into a new
facility being added onto the church. At that point, the old school
building will be turned over to a Montessori public school that now
occupies two classrooms in the building.

That arrangement is part of an unusual partnership Sorum has forged
with public school educators not only to share space, but also to work
jointly to promote the educational options in their neighborhood. Door
to door and on street corners, they hand out brochures promoting the
"Garden Homes Community of Schools"—the Lutheran school, the
Montessori program, and a public elementary school, as well as a public
high school and a Baptist one. The goal, Sorum says, is to serve
families and build up the community.

The promotion is needed in part because of the legacy of
desegregation, says Kenneth Johnson, a member of the Milwaukee school
board who represents the Garden Homes neighborhood. "We have 30 years
of conditioning saying the school in your neighborhood is no good,"
says Johnson, a supporter both of the voucher program and of a
neighborhood schools initiative that the district started in 2000 to
reduce busing. "That’s so misguided."

Terry McKissick, the African-American principal of the nearby Garden
Homes Community School, has canvassed the neighborhood with Sorum to
talk up his 350-student public elementary school, in the hope of
eventually reaching his 500-pupil enrollment target. "What I can see
happening now is going back to the ’50s and ’60s style of
education: Children walk to school, families know each other, and
parents participate in school events," McKissick says. "When they
brought in busing … you were integrating schools, but you were
breaking up communities."

A cornerstone of voucher critics’ argument against the choice
program is that participating private schools are not required to
administer standardized tests or to make the results public. "Rod
Paige, the last time he was here, talked about voucher schools helping
to close the achievement gap," Copeland says. "We don’t know
that. We have no idea if the children in these schools are learning
anything, because they’re not accountable."

Howard Fuller worries that 'the war' over vouchers has
divided people who should be working together to improve the
schools.

Don’t try telling that to Yvonne Ali, the founder and
executive director of the Agape Center of Academic Excellence, a
nonprofit organization that runs a child-care center and K-8 school on
the north side. Ali’s more than 320 students include about 145
children in the voucher program and roughly 175 whom the school
contracts with Milwaukee district to educate. Because of the
school’s connection to the district, Ali is required to
administer the same tests the public schools give. But for both groups,
she receives thousands of dollars less per pupil than is spent in the
public school system. Ali sees that arrangement as a form of
discrimination that is hurting independent, black-run schools such as
hers.

"I’m straddling the two worlds, and I’m in an
accountability situation that says I must produce," she says.
"We’re constantly trying to do as much or more as any public
school would do, and we still receive less money. It’s still
separate, but it is not equal."

Still, Ali says she does not think of the vouchers as a civil rights
issue, in part because the program was not set up to serve only
minority children. Enrollment at her own school is almost all black,
but that is because of who chooses to enroll, she says, not by design.
"We have some of the opponents of school choice saying that it’s
still separation—it’s for all minority children—which
is false," Ali says of the voucher program. "It’s for
economically deprived children."

Polly Williams, the legislator, says poor children and their
education have always been her chief concerns. And just as she
criticized supporters of desegregation for overlooking such
youngsters’ best interests, she has begun leveling similar
charges against some in the choice movement. She sponsored the bill
that extended the voucher program beyond secular schools, and says she
doesn’t regret it. But she worries that the new facilities
popping up at some religious schools around town are signs that the
program may be losing its focus.

"This was not intended to be a building program," Williams says. She
also contends that religious school leaders and other proponents of
choice are seeking legislative adjustments to the program that are
"driven more to support the building of new schools as opposed to the
needs of the child."

Among them is legislation to lift a cap that limits participation in
the choice program to roughly 15 percent of the city’s public
school enrollment. While many other choice advocates can’t
understand Williams’s stance, she says she views the proposal as
a form of tinkering that could spur other changes that would shift the
focus beyond city children from low-income households. "The Catholic
schools are the ones who want a lot of these changes," she says.

One school pushing to remove the cap is Messmer High School, a Roman
Catholic school where most teachers and administrators are white, but
whose student enrollment is now 91 percent black. Since Messmer began
accepting vouchers in 1998, the school’s enrollment has risen
from 307 to 545, and the share of youngsters using the tuition aid has
grown to 73 percent. Indeed, the choice program has been such a help to
the school that its new gymnasium is named the Gov. Tommy G. Thompson
Athletic Center, for the former Republican governor of Wisconsin who
signed the program into law.

Yet Messmer High Principal Jeff R. Monday says observers are wrong
to assume that at Messmer and other religious schools, "the physical
expansion is being done with choice money." At his school, he says, the
expansion was in the works well before the school entered the program.
"Every dime that went into expanding the school facilities was money
that was raised privately," he says. "So to say that the school is more
concerned with building than kids is absolutely false."

For his part, Fuller says he is saddened by the internecine disputes
within Milwaukee’s choice community. More important, he is
troubled by the bitter rift between voucher supporters and opponents,
which he says detracts from the determination that both groups share to
continue the work begun by the crusaders against segregated
schools.

"If we didn’t have to spend so much money, time, and energy on
the fight to just exist, we could be using those resources to make the
schools better," Fuller says. "There are people on both sides of the
issue who should be working together who aren’t because of the
war. That’s the tragedy of the whole thing, but I don’t see
that changing."

Coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision is
underwritten by grants from the Ford and Rockefeller
foundations.

In "Reversing White
Flight," an October 2002 article from The Atlantic Monthly, political
writer Jonathan Rauch argues that communities will benefit from added
diversity as a result of vouchers, regardless of the educational
impact.

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